In a full trial the Amsterdam Court has confirmed an earlier judgment and ordered The Pirate Bay to stop all their activities in The Netherlands. The Court ruled that the site's operators were assisting copyright infringement. If the three 'operators' fail to ban Dutch users, they will have to pay penalties of 50,000 euros per day.

In an attempt to ensure that Dutch citizens can’t access The Pirate Bay, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN took three of the tracker’s founders to court last summer.

The anti-piracy group won the case and Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde were ordered to block Dutch users, a decision they decided to appeal.

In the verdict of the initial appeal, the Court ruled that The Pirate Bay had to remove a list of torrents linking to copyrighted works and make their website inaccessible to Dutch visitors. This ruling was confirmed yesterday in a full trial by the Amsterdam Court.

The judge ruled that The Pirate Bay itself is not necessarily guilty of copyright infringement. However, according to the Court, the site’s operators assist in copyright infringement by allowing and encouraging its users to share torrents.

Previously, the defendants had argued that they were not the owners of the site, but a Seychelles-based company named Reservella. The Court rejected this defense as the defendants could not name the current owners or provide any documents proving that the site was sold. It concluded that the three defendants are responsible for the site.

In an appeal of one of the earlier cases against BREIN the defendants hired a lawyer to represent them, but in the full trial the defendants did not show up or defend themselves.

The Amsterdam Court ruled that Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter will now have to pay penalties of 50,000 euros per day if they don’t comply. However, based on their previous inaction and the claims that they are no longer responsible for The Pirate Bay, it is unlikely that Dutch users will be cut off.

The worrying thing for other BitTorrent site owners is that BREIN might use this case as a precedent in an attempt to get other big torrent sites offline. If that’s the case, the effects of the current judgement might be more severe that they appear at the moment.

In the meantime, BREIN has been anticipating and making the best of The Pirate Bay’s lack of response by starting a lawsuit against Dutch ISP Ziggo, demanding it blocks user access to The Pirate Bay website.